Few books pace themselves with the resonance of truth telling. These rare books can be fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, but within the story being told is a heart beating in time with constant universal rhythms. Thomas D.

Spectral presences flit in and out of In Light, Always Light, Milwaukee poet Angela Trudell Vasquez’s first chapbook. Ghosts appear with purposeful messages, the voices of dead ancestors echo, and human remains float over a city.

Southeastern Wisconsin is the western boundary of the “Rust Belt,” a phrase popularized by presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984 to describe a sizeable chunk of America that was—and still is—facing an uncertain post-industrial future.

Science writer and naturalist Scott Spoolman not only knows Wisconsin’s natural world well, his fine new book, Wisconsin State Parks: Extraordinary Stories of Geology and Natural History, reflects a lifetime spent in the woods and wilds o